HIS303: “A Cultural History of Death”

HIS303: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF DEATH

Last Offered: 2020 Term 3.

Next Offered: 2021 Term 3. Day and time to be determined. Eight consecutive sessions per Term. First class meets the week beginning Monday 2 August 2021.

Location: Hamilton, or on-line distance learning.

Sex used to be the great taboo. Up until the modern era, open talk related to the subject of sexuality was actively frowned upon. The subject of death, however was freely canvased. This situation has now been reversed. Death has become for modern men and women the new taboo, spoken of in hushed terms, if at all, kept concealed behind closed doors and largely unacknowledged.

However, recently this trend has been challenged. More and more people are wanting to speak openly about the subject of death. Indeed so pressing has become the need, that within the last few years a new ‘strange’ global phenomena has occurred that has seen the emergence of what are called “Death Cafes.” These “cafes” are simply pop-up meeting places where small groups of people gather to eat cake, drink tea and discuss the topic of death. Death has at last come out of the closet.

This series of eight talks, from our Selected Topics in History series, explores, historically, the subject of death from the perspective of several different disciplines: religion (both traditional and contemporary), philosophy, art, literature, music and film.

COURSE OUTLINE:

Week 1: Introduction–Overview and sociological perspective: What social/political/intellectual factors were and are at play that have moulded our relation to the topic of death. Historically, how has religion evolved and provided comfort in response to death. We will examine historically examples from Neanderthal man up to and including Christian thinking and everything in between.

Week 2: Contemporary theological thought: Why has there come about a shift in religious thinking in the modern age with regard to death. What has happened to Heaven and Hell? The liberal/Fundamentalist culture wars.

Week 3: Western Philosophical Traditions of Death: An examination of the western philosophical tradition beginning with Socrates and ending in the postmodern era with thinkers like Richard Rorty and Jacque Derrida. Why have philosophers gone quiet on the subject of mortality?

Week 4: Art and Death: A look at how art has represented death over the millenniums, beginning with cave art and tracing its history through all the permutations that take in Michelangelo, Munch, Picasso, Dali and Damien Hurst and many others with their various and different depictions and reactions to death.

Week 5: Literature and Death: Beginning with the oldest piece of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, we trace the story of how authors have confronted death. Among many works, we will be looking at The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Homer’s Odyssey, the book of Ecclesiastes, the Bhagavad Gita, Plato’s Phaedo, Virgil’s Aeneid, the New Testament, Dante’s Divine Comedy, along with authors such as Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, Arnold, Tolstoy, Hardy, Joyce, Faulkner, Camus, Beckett, DeLillo, Crace, Robinson, Roth and Max Porter. What light do such a diverse range of writers shed on the topic of death?

Week 6: Music and Death: Music over the centuries has played a large part in expressing an emotional response to the experience of death. This lecture will explore various musical genres from classical to pop, from Beethoven, Shostakovich to Bob Dylan, from Jazz to Blues and Rock in order to track not only the changing forms of musical expression, but also the shifts in belief reflected in the music.

Week 7: Film and Death: One of the most important cultural influences of the last century would be the advent of film. Beginning with the movie The Phantom Carriage (1921), we will explore this media in order to see how directors have tackled the subject of death and how that has changed over the decades. Included in our examination will be Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come, and Roy Anderson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, among others.

Week 8: Course Summary: A summation of things. What is there left over in our somewhat denuded secular culture to help deal with the tragic? Has the rot set completely in? Can other cultural perspectives add value – Buddhist, Hindu, Māori, neo-pagan, New Age? The return to the stoic virtues.

Prerequisites: There are no prerequisites for this course.

Distance Learning: This course has distance-learning options for those unable to attend the live class sessions in Hamilton. Students have three options for attending our courses once they have registered:

1. attend in-person classes in our Hamilton classrooms at the regularly scheduled day and time,
2. attend our live on-line classroom sessions via Zoom at the regular scheduled day and time,
3. watch the live-recorded class sessions at your leisure, at a time, day and place more suited to your schedule.

These options can be mixed and matched throughout the course to suit your own availability and location.